The Fab City: How can we produce deep cultural transformations by redistributing production?

Abstract

This is not a forecast of the future or a report from the past, the power of what we do today is going to shape both our past and future, so will concentrate on that. We are in the age of making possible the impossible, even of our own destruction; we (humans) have become geological agents in a process accelerated from the second half of the last century. We have entered the era of the anthropocene, we are transforming the pace of the planet, its climate, its ecosystems, exhausting its resources to sustain a model to live a life attached to a culture we have developed for a couple of hundred years, but that is a consequence of thousands of year of human history on earth. Any significant transformation in our culture has been attached to a technological revolution, that lead to a subsequent economic model, which at the same time shapes our societies. We are now integrating new technologies in our everyday life, and we are facing the tensions of a significant transition towards new values, models, power structures and even philosophies towards the human life on earth. We might be revisiting things we have reviewed in the past, but there is no question that we are doing it from a different perspective. Through this article I want to place us in the present, and introduce a possible future, which already started to be constructed.